Speculations: new Irish poetry

Eavan Boland's global feminism

Much recent poetry registers the modern expansion of citizenship as a practice of exclusion. The provision of rights to some means that others are kept excluded from those rights. So the world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, in The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914, writes that "the more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization" (146).

Justin Quinn and the gift of the translator

In his late work On Translation (2005), the French phenomenologist and literary theorist Paul Ricoeur brings together his lifelong investigations into ethics with a re-reading of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" (1923).

Some notes from the festival

Last weekend was the seventh annual Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival, in Dun Laoghaire, which is on the coast a short distance southeast of Dublin. The five-day festival, directed by Alice Lyons, had an extraordinary line-up, including readings by Paul Durcan, Maureen McLane, Tom Pickard, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Peter Sirr, Kei Miller, Peter Fallon, and David Ferry (among many others).

Emerging genealogies

The most interesting thing I read during a weekend of convalescence, under a March sun that seemed surprised at its own intensity, was this interview with Emma Penney on the website The Bogman's Cannon about an Irish modernist poet, Freda Laughton. Although Laughton was born in 1907, I feature the interview and her poems here because critical genealogies of twentieth-century Irish poetry are in the process of expanding dramatically.

I'll be writing in this space about contemporary Irish poetry and poetics, especially in Galway, where I'm living with my partner, the poet Lindsay Turner, and teaching until May. Irish poets have long taken the lead in seeking a global perspective on the local and the national. My general approach will be to explore how Irish poems and poets place themselves in the political geographies of contemporary global capitalism, using poetry to construct various forms of a social and literary commons, one deeply affected by emigration, translation, indigenization, secularization, and movements of global capital. This project is a taking in: of poems, scenes, archives, theories, statements, worries. The title "speculations" highlights the provisional nature of what you'll find here. It also emphasizes the way that Irish poetry and poetics are shaped by an age of financialization and precarious life. So this is a series of snapshots from a window in Salthill. An opening on the Atlantic. An obstructed view.

*

Walt Hunter is assistant professor of world literature at Clemson University and visiting lecturer at NUI Galway. He's written on modern and contemporary poetry for the minnesota review, Pleiades, College Literature, and Modern Philology. His current book project, Ecstatic Call: The Global Lyric from Yeats to the Present, looks at modern and contemporary lyric as a social form that makes visible processes of globalization.

*

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.